In reality, however, prosperity in such a case merely increases fertility because its sudden affluence reduces a community to the same careless indifference in regard to the future, the same hasty snatching at the pleasures of the moment, as we find among the most hopeless and least prosperous communities.
It is a significant fact, as shown by Beveridge, that the years when the people of Great Britain marry most are the years when they drink most.
It is in the absence of social-economic restraints—the absence of the perception of such restraints, or the absence of the ability to act in accordance with such perception—that the birth-rate is high.
Arsène Dumont seems to have been one of the first who observed this significance of the oscillation of the birth-rate, though he expressed it in a somewhat peculiar way, as the social capillarity theory.
It is the natural and universal tendency of mankind to ascend, he declared; a high birth-rate and a strong ascensional impulse are mutually contradictory. Large families are only possible when there is no progress, and no expectation of it can be cherished; small families become possible when the way has been opened to progress.
"One might say," Dumont puts it, "that invisible valves, like those which direct the circulation of the blood, have been placed by Nature to direct the current of human aspiration in the upward path it has prescribed."
As the proletariat is enabled to enjoy the prospect of rising it comes under the action of this law of social capillarity, and the birth-rate falls. It is the effort towards an indefinite perfection, Dumont declares, which justifies Nature and Man, consoles us for our griefs, and constitutes our sovereign safeguard against the philosophy of despair.